Am I missing something, or is it a bit odd that the top 20 ball collectors on the leaderboard barely even feature in the leaderboards for individual levels? People like ron, Jairo, Marius and myself feature on lots of level leaderboards for most balls collected, yet inexplicably the top 10 on the major leaderboard have hundreds more Goos collected and barely appear on single individual levels.

My tower building skill has gone down the pooper recently so I've been concentrating on optimizing levels, its just a bit of a pain to be stuck in 35th place with no way of getting higher than about 20th place at best!

Maybe a bit of an xmas bullshit check might be needed for that particular league table?  :(

Most of them are probably cheaters, and have been removed from the individual level boards, but not the total board.

Others may have been designing/playing extra levels.

Eg, I've been beta testing davidc's Jingle Balls level, and have thus collected 56 extra balls that are not available to most players. Now I've been very careful not to enter World of Goo Corporation, so my total has not been sent to the leaderboard (ie: my 1216 balls on that list are actual goo balls I got in the basic levels), but others might not have been so careful.

You could upload your pers2.dat to Soultaker's site and try to get into the top 10 there. Maybe Soultaker can make a feature where the total number of balls reported there is the sum of those gotten in the individual levels, so that we can play extra levels without messing up the list.

Maximal number of goo possible is now 1365.
Anything above it is not a reliable score.

And if you are seeing a player above 1300 with no presence at the level leaderboards you can be 99% sure that his score is not reliable.